NEW YORK CITY - James Caan delights in telling how he was twice voted "Italian Of The Year" by unspecified Italian-American organizations.

He acknowledges that it's an honest mistake.

"I grew up with everybody Italian in my my neighbourhood," he says. "We all talked the same, you know what I mean? And if you talk with a Brooklyn accent, people automatically think you're Italian."

Seated in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Caan nods east, towards Queens, to indicate his birthplace. "I grew up in Sunnyside," he says. "I don't know why they call it Sunnyside. It's the antithesis of anything sunny. We had a tree about eight blocks from the house. We called it the forest."

Caan is Jewish-Irish. The Italian impression comes not just from his birthplace, but from the persistent memory of his performance as the volatile Mafia scion Sonny Corleone in the classic Mob movie The Godfather.

Handsome, tough, intense, the young Caan looked the part. But his background doubtless helped him nail that role. "Not exactly bakers" was the way he described his criminal cronies back when he explained how he became familiar with the Mob milieu.

Now 60, the still-muscular actor says he still keeps contact with his old friends. In the role of a Mob chieftain in the Hugh Grant comedy Mickey Blue Eyes, Caan says he was actually visited on the set by a few wiseguy pals in a scene where he and Grant were supposed to be burying a body in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

"It's four in the morning and it's freezing and we're digging and a couple of guys came to visit," he says. "Right in the middle of the take, the guy goes, 'Hey Shoulders!' -- they used to call me Shoulders -- 'Hey Shoulders, don't dig too deep over there, all right?' "

If some Mob guys liked Caan, he reciprocated with his own affection. After making The Godfather, Caan says he had a friendly relationship with gangster Meyer Lansky. He's in an ideal position to comment on the public's long-running fascination with the Mafia.

"I think it had to do with honour and people just liked that sense of honour for family and loyalty," he says. "In those days it was so romantic, everybody just loved the mystery and the whole behind-the-scenes thing of the Mafia, but unfortunately today it's turned to crap. It ain't what it used to be."

Curiously, Caan seems to blame the success of law enforcement for tarnishing the Mafia romance. Thanks to the U.S.'s Rico law that targets organized crime, harsh sentences have made for tough times on godfathers. (Ask John Gotti.) A mobster, he says, used to accept a 10-year prison sentence "so he could get his kids into college and make them doctors or lawyers. That's the way it was.

"But today, my God, they throw numbers around like 50 years. And these people are already wealthy, so they're just doing it to be gangsters," he says. "Everybody wants to be a criminal but they don't want to commit the crimes."

So how do his connected friends react to movies about the Mob?

"They laugh," Caan says. "It's another form of flattery. If somebody's imitating me, I find that to be flattering, even if they're making fun of me. It kind of justifies your existence, you know? It verifies it."

Mobsters might find themselves laughing even harder at Mickey Blue Eyes, in which they are essentially the butt of the joke. Grant plays a genteel art dealer eager to marry into The Family. Caan says comedy is one of the only viable ways left to make Mafia movies.

"The truth is we've done so many of them, they're so stereotyped, there's nothing left but to make fun."

Upon leaving the room, James Caan prepares gathered reporters for Hugh Grant by taking a shot at him, in a good-natured way.

"I had to warm him up for you because he's so boring and so British, you know what I mean?" Caan says. "Such a nervous stiff ... "

Grant, Caan says, had reason to feel under the gun, so to speak, while making Mickey Blue Eyes. He and significant other Elizabeth Hurley also produced the comedy for their company Simian Films. He also gave the script an uncredited polish.

"He couldn't afford to laugh," Caan says, adding impetuously, "Tell 'im Jimmy said you have to speak very slowly and distinctly to him."

Once seated, Grant effortlessly returns the volley.

"He was confusing me with himself," he says. "Jimmy is now very very old."

Grant, on the other hand is just 38, or as he says, "a wonderfully young-looking 38."

He was born in London and raised in relative comfort, compared to Caan. He broke into the acting career on the London stage, then broke into a big-time acting career as the stuttering romantic hero who attempts to sweep Andie MacDowell off her feet in the 1994 comedy Four Weddings And A Funeral.

Grant has subsequently made something of a specialty of romantic comedies. His last one, Notting Hill, was released only two months ago. In almost every film, he's maintained the mild-mannered veneer of an English gentleman. But he's the first to admit to enjoying the primitive pleasures of the gangster movies such as Goodfellas and The Godfather.

"I know that among English guys like me, growing up, we worshipped those films," he says. "I can only suppose it seemed to be a manlier world that our sad, tea-drinking suburban lives.

"It's something pretty masculine and dangerous and exciting and something I've always loved," he says. "I've always been very hurt since I became a professional actor. Martin Scorsese has never telephoned me and asked me to do one of those things, because I always like to think I bring a kind of danger and menace to the screen," he says facetiously. (I'd estimate Grant is facetious a good 60 per cent of the time.)

Post-Krays era British crime, Grant says, offered little fuel to the imagination.

"We have a rather sad East End organized crime, but they all look like girls' blouses next to the Italian Mob."

Thus Grant steeped himself in the pop lore of the American Mafia. And when he and Hurley took on the task of producing Mickey Blue Eyes, he says "we were very keen to get it right."

Thus, Grant, Hurley, director Kelly Makin and co-star Jeanne Tripplehorn set up visits with authentic New York mobsters and even let them offer suggestions to the script.

"They thought it was pretty accurate anyway but they gave us a couple of notes," Grant says. "And then of course we cast the whole film out of their number. Almost everyone who plays a mobster in this film -- and this is where I have to tread very carefully -- is very, very well-researched in that area.

"We wanted all that authenticity because the Mob are very funny in themselves, you know, you don't need to add anything or parody them or any of that stuff."

In this research phase, Grant discovered that Mafiosi were not above the use of verbal delicacy when describing, for example, someone serving time.

"I always liked that, when you're having dinner with them, they'd say, 'Lenny's away right now.' 'Oh where, to the seaside?' 'He's away.'

In fact, Grant got so wrapped up researching the Mafia, he says he "forgot" to research his own role of an auctioneer.

"On the last day (of pre-production), I picked up and went to Sotheby's to watch an auction, and the guy went so fast, I thought, 'Sod that, I can't do any of that,'

"So I just invented my own method, which I think you'll find is widely imitated," he says, adding that he does regret the oversight.

"If I'd been Daniel Day-Lewis, I'd have lived as an auctioneer for five years and married one of them and slept with a hammer between my buttock cheeks," he says.

It's delightfully uncharacteristic. Evidently, while among the Mob, or perhaps hanging with Caan, Grant learned a thing or two about how to take a shot.

NEW YORK -- In the beginning, God made movies. By the fourth or fifth day, tiring of the serious stuff, He made romantic comedies.

 But seven decades later, with Divine Inspiration lost, the genre is struggling.

 "It's just the formula," grouches one of Hollywood's hottest screenwriters, the irreverent Kevin Williamson of Scream and Dawson's Creek fame. "I'm just sick to death of getting two huge stars who walk through a movie from plot 'A' to plot 'B' saying: 'I hate you, I hate you, but you're kind of cute.' I'm talking about When Harry Met Sally ... or even The Goodbye Girl, which was well done, really good formula filmmaking. It was wonderful but it's enough already!"

 Enough? Maybe it's never enough. The formulaic Runaway Bride, which reunites Pretty Woman co-stars Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in a painfully predictable romantic comedy, was the box-office winner in its debut last weekend. As usual, the two stars start off hating each other. Then they individually decide the other is kind of cute. They fall in love.

 Even Gere openly admitted audiences would know who was going to marry who at the end of the movie just by looking at the marquee. No suspense. No fooling anybody.

 Earlier this year, Notting Hill, which teamed Roberts with Hugh Grant, was a huge hit. Everyone knew then that Roberts would come back and Grant would get the girl.

 Now Grant is co-starring with Jeanne Tripplehorn in Mickey Blue Eyes, a romantic comedy he developed with his lover Elizabeth Hurley, who serves on the movie as co-producer.

 Obviously, audiences are still hungry for romantic comedy, as they have been since the watershed year of 1934 when Frank Capra's effervescent It Happened One Night opened on Feb. 23 at New York's Radio City Music. It was what would become called "a screwball comedy," starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. The movie teamed stars who created at least the illusion of on-screen sexual chemistry (even though Gable was a pain in the butt on set), infused their banter with snap and rhythm, and guaranteed audiences a happy ending.

 The term "screwball" (a publicist's invention) morphed into romantic comedy. We've seen hundreds of them ranging from classics such as Bringing Up Baby with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn through The Thin Man series with William Powell and Myrna Loy, to the modern era with the likes of Billy Crystal and Tom Hanks pairing with Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally... , Sleepless In Seatle and You've Got Mail. Not all of them were good. Many more, like one of Hugh Grant's Hollywood movies, Nine Months, were mediocre.

 But filmmakers keep hoping for a big score. Grant and Hurley are literally banking on it, with Grant doing a huge promotional push for the Aug. 20 opening of Mickey Blue Eyes.

 Grant has help. "I'm still a sucker for it," co-star Tripplehorn says. "I like a good romantic comedy. I think there's a place in the world still for romantic comedy. I don't think it's dead."

 What Mickey Blue Eyes offers, which the clumsy Runaway Bride does not, is a hybrid of genres that changes the rules. The new movie melds both romantic comedy and a mafia spoof. Grant's character, an erudite Englishman working in a New York art auction house, finds out just before his wedding to Tripplehorn that she is the daughter of a mob boss, played by James Caan. Silliness ensues.

 "It's helpful," Tripplehorn says of the blend of genres. "It's new blood. I think it also says something about the mafia, or the gangster genre, and how that's really nearing the end when it gets down to comedies and parodies like Analyze This. So, hopefully, we've given the romantic comedy a little lifeblood by doing this, killing two genres with one stone."

 Grant, of course, would prefer to reinvent the two genres, not kill them. He's got too much at stake. But he recognizes that it is difficult to make a good romantic comedy in the cynical '90s.

 Why? "The answer is, I don't know! But you've just got to have a writer (the team of Adam Scheinman and Robert Kuhn for Mickey Blue Eyes) or a greater force behind it who still has some freshness or hasn't had it bred out of them by the Hollywood cookie cutter system."

 That system, says Grant, "will reproduce identical or 'identikit' romantic comedies one after the other. I should know because I'm the man who has been sent every single one of them, every single romantic comedy, in the last five years."

 Grant figures that Nine Months, "to be fair," is the only Hollywood romantic comedy he has actually starred in. "I think of Notting Hill as a British film and Mickey Blue Eyes is really -- well, I don't know what it is -- but it's American money (through Castle Rock Entertainment with Warner Bros. distribution), it's a Canadian director (Kelly Makin of Toronto), and there's quite a large British influence in this, as well.

 "I like to think there's a British/Canadian silliness to Mickey Blue Eyes which perhaps gives it an identity different from the run-of-the-mill ones."

 James Caan loves the melding of genres in Mickey Blue Eyes, not that he would be inclined to go to the movie if he weren't in it. "I don't go to the movies that often. If it doesn't have a ball in it, I don't watch it," says the sports nut.

 But Caan does object to the idea that contemporary romantic comedies need to be hybrids to be any good. "What was Hugh's last picture?" Caan asks. "Notting Hill," I offer. "What was that filtered through?" Caan asks. "Nothing but romantic comedy," I admit. "HA!" Caan says triumphantly.

 Maybe it's the Hugh Grant factor. "He's just a romantic little guy," Caan says with a mischievous grin that indicates the irascible actor is going to do one of his spiels. "The story's really about me and him," Caan continues about Mickey Blue Eyes. "He kisses very well, you know. He's very soft. We're picking out furniture next Thursday. You just didn't look deep enough when you watched this. You just thought it was some flippant comedy. It's a whole homosexual thing going on."

 Caan's kidding, of course, but his take on the issue just demonstrates that it's time to make fun of the conventions of romantic comedy.

 Kevin Williamson certainly plans to do just that. Williamson, whose new teen flick Teaching Mrs. Tingle subverts and reinvents that tired genre (it's scheduled for release the same day as Mickey Blue Eyes), plans to break open the romantic comedy with his next movie, Her Leading Man.

 "I've got it covered," he teases. "I've got it so covered."

 Williamson plans to do the formula -- a man and a woman are handcuffed together, forced to cooperate and then find themselves falling in love -- and then bust it up by having the characters talk about the rules of romantic comedy.

 "We follow every rule and every device as we go along and somewhere about the middle of the movie you get this horrible feeling that it's not going to end happily, that this really will be the movie that breaks the rule."

 No happy ending on a romantic comedy? Horrors! "Gotcha covered," promises Williamson. "Trust me, it's a wonderful ending." And maybe a whole new beginning for the genre.

The ROMANTIC COMEDY File

 THE BIRTH: In 1934, as 'the screwball comedy,' with four key films: It Happened One Night, Twentieth Century, The Thin Man and The Gay Divorcee.

 THE CLASSICS: A long list includes the 1934 quartet and Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey, Top Hat, Nothing Sacred, True Confession, The More The Merrier, His Girl Friday, The Lady Eve and dozens of others. Legendary critic Pauline Kael called the 1930s entries "that sustained feat of careless magic."

 THE MODERN ERA: Check out the filmographies of Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal, Tom Hanks and Hugh Grant and look for the romantic couplings.

Hot on the heels of Notting Hill, Grant releases another romantic comedy Mickey Blue Eyes